My Jotting – Week 4 – Walter Benjamin
A writer whose start was clumsy, whose ending was tragic, and whose fame was posthumous, Walter Benjamin nevertheless lived admirably, standing apart from the conventions of occupation and social life, apart from the Jewish society to which he belonged, and apart from genre in his chosen scholarship. Hannah Arendt narrates his story.
One can distill this essay structurally, identifying two broad objectives, with the first being to portray Benjamin as someone who was plagued by misfortune—often being pushed there by clumsiness. Arendt creates a backdrop for this theme in Benjamin’s life through a story about “Mr. Bungle,” the “little hunchback,” a character German mothers would use in explaining accidents to their children: the little one, i.e. misfortune, looks at you, but you don’t pay attention, for you are clumsy. Arendt, then, details several cases where Benjamin walks into misfortune: In 1939 Benjamin fled Paris over the threat of German bombing but ended up near a troop center in Meaux, which presented more of a risk; he censured Friedrich Gundolf in his “first public breakthrough,” a study on Goethe, and “spoiled {his} only chance for a university career”; he lost stipends for reading and editing manuscripts when the publisher he worked for went bankrupt; his work sat undistributed in a cellar as another publisher, this time his own, claimed insolvency; finally, in the gravest of any episode of misfortune, Benjamin committed suicide while fleeing a possible repatriation from France to Nazi Germany, after narrowly missing an opportunity to cross through Spain into Portugal. Arendt stops short of fully addressing the psychology behind this tragic decision, which confused me a bit.
More central, however, to Arendt’s portrayal of Benjamin is what one can perceive to be the second broad objective of the piece—that is, to portray Benjamin as someone who stood outside of the many conventions which could have bound his life, spirit, and work. Arendt asserts, “often an era most clearly brands with its seal those who have been least influenced by it, who have been most remote from it, and therefore who have suffered the most.” She argues further that Benjamin never really felt at home in the 20th Century. First off, he sought to become the “foremost critic of German literature” when that genre hadn’t existed, as a serious endeavor, in Germany for 50 years. In fact, Benjamin never submitted to a true profession, choosing instead the life of the “homme de letters” whose “material existence was based on income without work, and their intellectual attitude rested upon their resolute refusal to be integrated politically or socially.” In isolating himself from his own ethnic group’s self-deception about anti-Semitism, a deception bolstered by that group’s economic success, Benjamin refused to take refuge in either Zionism or Communism. In a truly inspiring explanation, he refers to these as ideologies as means to a “false salvation.” In turn Benjamin “settled down in the desperate conditions which corresponded to reality,” which was the reality created by the Jewish question, for the sake of his work. In his work, too, Benjamin thwarted convention. Whereas the use of quotation in writing, at first, was to preserve, he used it to destroy. He felt it was “the only one {power} which still contains the hope that something from this period will survive—for no other reason that it was torn out.” His literary style rested outside of genre. In relying heavily upon quotations, Benjamin “drilled rather than excavated” and forced insights without prepackaging a message in his work. I must admit that it was somewhat difficult to conceptualize Arendt’s description of his style, and I wish I had exposed myself to Benjamin’s work prior to taking on her essay.
One Comment
Great review.